TORONTO - The Battle of Los Angeles came to Toronto Wednesday night as Rage Against The Machine brought their "secret" club tour here for its only Canadian stop.
The L.A. quartet's new album "The Battle of Los Angeles" doesn't arrive in stores until next month, but you'd be hard-pressed to tell by the reaction of the 1,200 fans packed inside the neo-gothic interior of the Phoenix Concert Theatre, desperate for a taste of the new music.
The curse of every touring band is to face indifference whenever newer, less familiar material is trotted out. But right from Rage Against The Machine's opening salvo -- "Testify" and "Guerilla Radio," both from the new album -- their fans were in a pogoing, moshing, screaming tizzy. The show, which clocked in at just over an hour, was nasty, brutish and short, but devastatingly effective.
Singer Zack de la Rocha dispensed with audience-patter pleasantries and threw himself into a set of politically charged-up songs like the new numbers "Calm Like A Bomb" and "Broken Man" - tunes that ran the emotional gamut from indignation to sputtering fury. The Phoenix's stage seemed scarcely large enough to contain the singer, who was flanked by bassist Tim Bob and drummer Brad Wilk, who laid down a thundering-but-funky rhythm, and the headspinning guitar work of Tom Morello,
De la Rocha delivered his lyrics in a venomous shriek and pogoed madly, frequently letting the audience take over delivering older numbers like "Killing In The Name," "People Of The Sun" and "Bullet In The Head," and occasionally dropping to his knees at stage-front to jab a finger at the mosh-pit to underscore each syllable. Between songs, he crouched by the drumkit as if he needed to collect himself anew to conjure each song's catalogue of outrages. He's not one of those performers who mails it in by delivering the song to a neutral point at the back of the hall. He makes eye-contact and points at specific audience members and lets no-one off the hook.
"The Battle of Los Angeles" doesn't represent much of a change in style or tone for Rage Against The Machine, but it also shows no signs of the group blunting its uncompromising viewpoint. What it does document, though, is the continuing growth of Morello's guitar artistry. The great guitarists are the ones who expand the pallet of noise we expect to hear coming from the instrument. On this night, during a riotously-received "Bulls On Parade," Morello used his right hand to yank at his guitar's toggle switch, while scraping the palm of his left hand across the guitar's pick-up to create something very like the sound of a hip-hop deejay working the turntable.
Morello whipped jolting funk, molten metal and hip-hop scratches from his instrument, and it became abundantly clear that he has joined the pantheon of guitar giants (as much as he might despise the elitism that honor would suggest). The folk singer Woody Guthrie once painted across his acoustic guitar, "This machine kills fascists." Morello could customize his axe to simply read: "This machine kills."
JAM! Rating: 3.5 out of 5
